


So Hard to Find My Way

by zade



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Grounder AU, Grounder Bellamy Blake, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, murphamyweek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-24 12:08:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7507744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zade/pseuds/zade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His head spins like a top, and the world goes tilt-y under him, like the time the Ark hit a meteor and went spinning spinning spinning, out of control and he would vomit if he had been given anything to eat in the last day.  The cage is too small and even if his hands weren’t trapped behind him, he doesn’t have the space to move.  He lets his head lull, tries to remember how to breathe past the burning pressure in his chest,. He opens his eyes once more and the stranger’s eyes are gone.</p>
<p>Grounder AU for Murphamy week</p>
            </blockquote>





	So Hard to Find My Way

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to the amazing hateboners for the beta as always
> 
> warnings for: references to torture? first season canon? idk with this one
> 
> title definitely not from brown eyed girl

The first time Murphy sees him is when they’re dragging him back to the small cage that he’s called home for thirty of the most painful hours of his life. They throw him in, hands shackled at his back, a wad of cloth shoved behind his teeth, mouth dry and head spinning, and Murphy sees him staring through a gap in the trees.

The whites of his eyes gleam in the firelight and Murphy was sure that that was the kind of thing that only showed up the flowery descriptions in the mediocre fiction he read when he was a boy, but it’s the eyes he sees first.

There is a bonfire feet away from him, but he is so cold. Staring at it makes his eyelids explode in oranges and greens when he closes them. He thought he knew greens in the hydroponic greenhouse on the Ark, but having spent less than a week on Earth, he can’t get past the fact that he hadn’t ever really know green.

His head spins like a top, and the world goes tilt-y under him, like the time the Ark hit a meteor and went spinning spinning spinning, out of control and he would vomit if he had been given anything to eat in the last day. The cage is too small and even if his hands weren’t trapped behind him, he doesn’t have the space to move. He lets his head lull, tries to remember how to breathe past the burning pressure in his chest,. He opens his eyes once more and the stranger’s eyes are gone.

They throw a blanket on him. He feels like it is too much of a kindness, and he can’t parse it.

Murphy sees them again the next morning. Brown, a deep earthy brown, darting towards him through the bushes. They drag him out of the cage, flay the skin from his back and chest and arms with a knotted whip as he screams and cries. The eyes stay on him the whole time.

It helps, somehow. His mom used to talk to him about angels, guardians watching over him, keeping him safe. After his father died, there were no more angels, only alcohol. And maybe it’s the pain, the fever he can feel burning under his skin, but when he sees those brown, brown eyes, Murphy thinks, angel.

They let him go that night. He is released from his bonds and set into the forest in the pitch black, legs trembling and arms too weak for him to even support himself on a tree. He is dying, he is pretty sure, and there’s an insistent cough tugging at his throat.

Murphy sees the eyes again, before he can make out the whole body. He’s tall, tan skinned and gorgeous in the way that Murphy can’t remember any other real people being. He’s dressed like the warriors at the camp were, which should make him afraid, but doesn’t.

His guardian angel.

“You’re not gonna make it,” the man says, and Murphy hasn’t heard English in so many days that he thinks he must be hallucinating.

“You…?”

“Here,” the man says gruffly, and eases him onto the forest floor. His knees are in agony, but sitting instead of kneeling is a great relief. There’s a fire on the ground, Murphy realizes. No, a torch maybe. He’s not sure he’s ever really seen a torch before. “You want water?” the man asks after a long moment.

Murphy would cry if he was hydrated enough to do so. “Yes,” he rasps, and the man helps him gulp tepid water from a waterskin. “Thank you.”

“Hmm,” he responds, appraising Murphy by the light of the torch. “My name is Bellamy. I am going to get you back to your people.” He opens a pouch at his waist and pulls out a hunk of some sort of smoked meat and offers it to Murphy.

His stomach is empty and roiling and he hasn’t eaten in days. He grabs it and tries to look less desperate.

“Murphy,” he says through a mouthful of meat. “And feel free to not. They’ll kill me, first chance they get.”

Bellamy looks startled at his news. “Kill you?”

Murphy tries to grin, but his face droops sleepily. After sitting and eating and drinking, he is exhausted and feels weaker and more in pain than ever. “Yup,” he says and makes a resounding pop with ‘p’.

“Nonetheless.”

His vision narrows, spins and his body aches and burns in ways he couldn’t have even thought possible before. “Please,” he says, and he doesn’t know what he’s asking for.

Bellamy stands and lifts him, cradles him to his chest, and Murphy can’t manage to stifle his scream as his body moves and bends beyond his will. “Rest,” Bellamy commands, and he does.

Murphy wakes up to Monty prodding him with a stick, sick and sore and coughing up blood, which isn’t his proudest moment.

It occurs to him, later, after half the camp is sick and dying, that he was handed a new-Earth equivalent of a pox blanket, and Bellamy was probably only a fever dream.

His wounds heal slowly, partially because he’s reluctant to take off his shirt around Clarke and show her—she is the closest they have to a doctor—and partially because he can’t stop moving to rest. He moves and helps and he tries to forget the ugly hatred on the faces of his peers and the sting of blows against his body and the taste of blood thick on his tongue and in his nose and the scent of iron and fire wood and cold and he can’t breathe or sleep or stop—

And so his revenge gets plays out, stupid and ill-planned and he is so tired and as he runs into the forest, running on adrenaline alone because his body is aching and failing, he realizes he is going to die. At the hands of his people, at the hands of the Grounders, it doesn’t matter. He’s dead.

He collapses on the ground, hopes he’s far enough from the camp that he won’t be found and killed, and nervous, he looks around and see’s Bellamy’s brown eyes again.

“Oh,” he says, dumbly. “You’re here.”

Bellamy eyes him up and down. “You’re still injured.” There’s a crash through the bushes, not near them, but close. “You’re being hunted.”

“Most popular guy on Earth,” Murphy quips, but his eyes feel heavy.

“Up,” Bellamy commands, and lifts him over his shoulder. It makes Murphy’s ribs burn with agony.

Bellamy runs faster with Murphy over his shoulder than Murphy has ever run in his life. He grasps the collar of Bellamy’s jacket and holds on with all his worth.

Bellamy takes him back to a cave of some sort. It’s homey, in a home-that-is-also-a-cave kind of way. Bellamy lays him down a cot covered in thick furs and begins pulling off his clothes.

“Take a guy to dinner first,” Murphy murmurs, exhausted.

“Hush. I need to tend to your wounds.” Bellamy eases him out of his shirt, hissing sympathetically where it sticks to his skin. 

“And then what?” Murphy realizes he’s having trouble keeping his eyes open, and not that the world is just getting darker.

Bellamy begins cleaning his wounds with a basin of water that came from somewhere. “You heal. Then,” he says, and Murphy can see him smiling, all white teeth and pleased expression, “I teach you to fight.”

Well, Murphy thinks, as his eyes ease shut, beats dying.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm racetrackthehiggins and i approve this message


End file.
